by Colin Hyde
PUPs who buy lock, stock, and barrel into the Price, Rogers, Shoman story about the road to independence will squirm when they learn that long before the PUP started internationalizing our story, there was a man, Compton Fairweather, who was using his considerable technical skills and international connections to help protect our country and guide us to the promised land.
Congratulations to Mr. Lawrence Vernon on a well-researched book, and thanks especially to the King of Bird’s Isle (and, and parts of Placencia too), Brother Henry Young, who saw the importance of recording Brother Compton’s story and put his money to back the research and publishing of Compton Fairweather – Visions of a Humble Nationalistic Belizean.
George Price and the PUP rejected Compton Fairweather. Philip Goldson and the NIP embraced him.
And I think I will end there. Let the PUPs, particularly Bill Lindo and Albert Vaughan, find out for themselves.
Big points for AG, and a complaint about hihn di dillydally
I can’t give AG Anthony Sylvester gold stars on all his decisions since taking over from Ms. Magali, but his batting average is very high, and in respect to his handling of the prosecutor situation, well, Braa, you couldn’t have done betta; no one could. In the face of the insistence by the very loud vocal media that a number of prosecutors were on a sickout, the AG stuck to his guns to protect his staff, who it appears hadn’t been so well-advised. Ouch, no couching, no hedging, no possible Covid outbreak, the vocal media was absolutely definitive that it was a sickout, and must be called so.
The vocal media should have checked itself on this one. My friends, the good of Belize must always be at the fore, and I don’t know how we were served by exacerbating the ill-advised move by the prosecutors that will reduce their credibility that is so essential in their execution of their duties.
Magali left Anthony an, ehm, tricky hand. She has to take the stand and explain, for she has to have known that you give a raise there, a raise will be expected, demanded, here. Of course, these literati lawyers aren’t known to pay attention to any numbers besides their personal bottomline, but the “reaction”, what happens next, shouldn’t have escaped anyone. I absolutely can’t find an escape hatch she could jump through to stay clear of suspicion that it was her plot all along to see local prosecutors get handled. She has fled to the private sector, but if I were Joe Waight, I’d make a beeline to her office to have a little chat with her.
Of course, this noh done with the return to health of the prosecutors after they got their chum. My, how they jumped on the new AG! But I’m not worried about his skin. He isn’t vicious enough for electoral politics, but he did enter the fray, twice, which shows that he has an egotistical view of himself and therefore the requisite leather hide to withstand the barbs of rejection. Oho, when the politician gets battered at the polls it is not because they are deficient, oh no, it is because we are dunces, shortsighted ignorant fools who don’t know a seasoned captain who will guide us through a storm from a rosewater sailor who will crash us into the reef.
The modus operandi of the prosecutors might not be defensible, but for their objective they might be guilty with an explanation. The defense lawyers are buddies with the criminals. Hn, Bukele should have thrown them into jail too. But we’ll leave that, for another time, except for pointing out that Bukele can’t be as bad as they say he is. The defense lawyers are being paid big, big money. We won’t go into wherefrom. The prosecutors aren’t friends with the criminals. The prosecutors want to do their jobs, for the good of their country, but they aren’t being paid enough to afford the security they need in this Belize that is not anymore the one we knew. Thus they turned to a desperate thing.
Our prosecutors might have, must have been suffering a little jealousy. It’s natural that the prosecutors, even if their inclination is for public service, would be a little envious of their private brothers and sisters grazing on the luscious green pastures. Aha, the story here is that our local prosecutors were insulted and stirred to envy because the present regime had gone abroad for help, and paid that help at a significantly higher rate.
Some might say the AG didn’t understand the rules of engagement, but no, a sickout is a tool for “common” public servants, bottom tier, for the most vulnerable among us. You expect the accused fu lai, not the lawyers. The sickout is a tool of labor that isn’t too honorable. It might be the only dishonorable tool of labor. The Wikipedia describes the sympathy strike, where a contented group of workers strike to support a group that is discontented with their employers; the jurisdictional strike, where the union attempts to block employers from changing job assignments of employees without first getting their approval; the rolling strike, where all the workers in a company don’t go on strike simultaneously but instead bring on the pressure by disrupting one link in the work chain at a time; the hunger strike; and the notorious sickout, where workers who aren’t sick take sick leave at the same time.
The sickout has become quite popular with our public service. The law says that public servants can go on sick leave for all of 16 days each year. When they get together on a grievance, it is the first tool they run for to make the government get the sense. It’s kind of an unwritten law that the sickout as a tool isn’t for all tiers in the public service. Senior managers in the service would lose all authority if they pulled that stunt. Thus, fifty percent of the prosecutors getting sick at the same time is a bad flu going around, and we are very familiar with such occurrence, since a virus caused our entire country to be out of office for months during the pandemic.
Ah, I give the AG the highest points for protecting his troops. But I don’t give him full points for needing all of two months to review the accusation against Minister Perez. I trust he will bring in the proper verdict, and soon.
I hope the AG isn’t afraid of being skewered by the vocal media. Let me beef with those bohgaz again before I go. Vocal media, why are you frothing over “personal” social media texts? Daam, the modern Russians have absolutely smashed privacy, for protection from American infiltration, and we can’t run to the Americans because they too have sold out, they for the excitement. But we can hold up our end. Is our stiff British upbringing for nothing? Have we wasted all those colonial years?
It might look good to some for the AG to be fiddling around with this case, but it is all fraud that serious thought input is necessary here. If what has been batted about by the vocal media and the UDP is all the fire, this is making theater of a matter that is cut and dried. There is no Sanctuary Bay here, no passport sales, no handing over our economy to Lord Ashcroft. This is a tryst gone sour, and subsequent melodrama over failure to deliver on a vacant house lot that is held dear by one of the parties.
Come on, AG, get that verdict in. Have you considered the embarrassment of poring over notes for two months, and then finding out it is all stolen identities, or AI? If that doesn’t get you, this should. Braa: don’t be like Marshalleck. Da we di fut dis bill!